Truth from Trees
I couldn’t tell you how many trees I pass on my three-mile walk to work. A few hundred? At the beginning of my walk I pass through neighborhoods with a dozen trees or more in each yard, and then I pass a park. Could there be a thousand trees in a few blocks’ worth of park?
The trees that caught the most of my attention yesterday morning are the ones that line Connecticut Avenue. They’ve shed most of their leaves now, and men with gasoline-powered blowers have cleared some portions of the sidewalk while other sections retain a soft carpet as the leaves begin to wilt. They’re trying to return to earth, to harbor insects, to feed birds, to become soil.
What caught my attention was the way the trees’ presence is unquestionably deliberate, and it is also unquestionably peripheral. The main event is the buildings. Stone entrance stairways, brass ornaments, guarding lions; old French doors on second floors that have all rattled shut, terra cotta roofs off in Kalorama. Miles and miles of insulated copper wire, plumbing within — some parts of DC even still receive centrally-generated steam, if I’m not mistaken. One block following another for miles. All of it conspicuously designed to receive human activity.
In this scheme, trees are a garnish. They are invited to the event, but they are not the event. Their purpose is to accentuate and make things more pleasant, but we are perhaps not expected to give them too much attention.
And that’s despite the fact that a tree is what it is. Old city buildings are remarkable, but every tree is continually doing things infinitely beyond what a building can do. Collecting sunlight to make sugar; coiling and surging as they must around the blocky objects we create; sensing the seasons, retreating for winter. Based on current research, we could even speculate that trees have opinions.
Yesterday, I regarded one knotty root system overhanging a slab of pavement and I though about how those roots worked their way unseen in a large network underground, spreading and bifurcating in the dark soil. Just a few feet down, there are places where the city ceases and quickly again there is just the earth being the earth, the Earth being the Earth.
We can’t make trees. To the extent we could ever make trees, those trees would be facsimiles, products of laboratories, not products of, ultimately, billions of years of evolution worked out among, ultimately, millions of species. A tree is a creation which exceeds our creations in every conceivable way, and it is a product of a mechanism of creation that exceeds our mechanisms of creation in every conceivable way. Whatever we choose to do to trees, and by whatever right, we are certainly not the masters of tree-ness. We behold it. We are in relationship with it.
Ten minutes after looking at those gnarled roots, I met with one of my colleagues outside the building where we work, and we walked in together. We talked about our Christmas plans. “Do you get a tree?” she asked.
I said I didn’t because I spend my weekends at my parents’ and they’ll get a tree. I also said that recently I’ve been thinking about the oddness of the act of cutting down a living being and dragging it into the house for the sake of celebrating the birth of Jesus, and how those thoughts have at least started to inflect how I think about Christmas trees. “Because,” I added, “it’s clear that I am exactly no fun.”
My colleague laughed and waved this off. But seriously, where is the fun in complaining about Christmas trees? And this a couple of weeks after complaining about Thanksgiving, on Thanksgiving?
But also, how can you take a good look at the arrangement of trees in a city and not recognize that we have probably gone far enough in certain directions? Indeed, perhaps too far? This is not evidence tucked away in some feedlot, or a roomful of battery cages. It’s right there in front of us.
It’s not to say that the way forward is clear, or that the answers are obvious. But at a time when we finally seem to arriving at some amount of agreement that we have created a climate crisis that begs for us to shift course, and meanwhile you look at the spontaneous majesty of these living things, rendered into a mere backdrop in the aesthetic service of countless tons of inanimate concrete, when all of the humanness contained in the concrete is mostly, in one way or another, oriented toward doing more of the same to rest of the living world — all of it totally, unquestionably normalized —
I’m just saying, how can anyone not see at this point, at the very least, that we’re all called to divest of something?